Another masterful essay on reputation management, following on the heels of Charisma is Bullshit. By the one-item intelligence test (the degree that your views are the same as mine), David Pinsof is a genius.
Although I cannot fault him for not citing sources that he is not familiar with or influenced by (or was simply unable to cite due to lack of time or space because you cannot cite every relevant source), I wish he would acknowledge the work of Erving Goffman's ideas on impression management in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Also (for selfish reasons) writings by my graduate school mentor, Robert Hogan (who was influenced by Goffman), and myself about personality as a form of reputation management by signaling. Hogan has argued that it is all about "getting along" (having people like you) and "getting ahead" (establishing status), and that signaling is the method by which people strive to achieve these things.
Hogan and I believe that most signaling is perfectly unconscious. Which makes good sense because self-conscious self-presentation tends to be awkward and unconvincing. I was wondering what David thought about conscious versus unconscious signaling, and glad to see that he commented on that in a footnote.
Whenever we say something like "most signaling is defensive" or "most signaling is unconscious," this raises the question of meaningful, stable individual differences (that is, personality) that coexist with the general trend. I wonder if David thinks that, in contrast to the generalization that most signaling is defensive, there are people who are consistently more offensive in their signaling than the typical individual, and how we might characterize them. Narcissistic? Histrionic?
One more thought that came to mind while reading this essay concerns the unacknowledged details about the function of informational signaling. This is not a shortcoming of the present essay, which could not possibly answer that question in a single Substack post. It seems to me that there has been an unbalanced treatment of the functions of communication by scientists who study this topic. Speech communication experts have written so much about the purpose of communication being the transfer of information from one person to another, and so little about how communications are literally attempts to control the behavior of other people. We do speak to give others information, but we don't provide information for the sole purpose of providing information. Rather, there is almost always an assumption that this information will make the other person feel a certain way, which will motivate them to behave in ways that we would like them to.
The field of linguistic pragmatics does deal with this function of communication, but pragmatics has been overshadowed by research on syntax and semantics. To its credit, the current essay suggests that the general function of signaling is to achieve status (or to avoid losing status). But the unanswered question is, what specific behaviors in the other person are we trying to encourage that will help our own status? The answer to that question is surely that there are dozens of specific behaviors that we are trying to encourage, depending on context, and that documenting them all could take a team of researchers a lifetime to achieve. I'm just saying that this could be a worthwhile endeavor.
Thanks for the kind words, John. I may have to steal that joke about the one-item intelligence test. I agree there is variation in signaling behavior, and in particular the strength of offensive vs. defensive motivation. I strongly suspect that people who are more inclined toward offense would score more highly on things like narcissism, but I'm not an expert in this area. I fully agree with you that linguistics has too big of an emphasis on information transmission and not nearly as big of an emphasis on pragmatics, social signaling, emotional and epistemic vigilance, and ostensive communication. I'm a big fan of Thom Scott-Philips' work in this area, who is leading the charge in making linguistics more rigorously evolutionary. Of course, the complexity of the social signals here are dizzying and I don't pretend to know a fraction of it. I confess I haven't read Goffman, though I do hear his name a lot in reference to my work. You've convinced me to give him a proper read and citation the next time I bring up these ideas. I will also check out Hogan. Thanks for the recommendations.
Feel free to steal the joke--I stole it from Hogan. Thank you for the tip on the work of Thom Scott-Philips and on Robert Hanson. Both look very interesting.
This reads like a shift from “signaling as peacocking” to “signaling as navigation.” If most signaling is unconscious and often defensive, then it’s less about manipulation, and more about maintaining footing in a status aware environment. The system runs whether or not we narrate it, and we're all inside it.
The interesting tension you’re pointing to is between the general rule (most signaling is defensive) and individual differences: who escalates, stabilizes, or overreaches. Because there's an exchange between two humans who may both be signaling to be protective. That feels like where personality lives: not outside of signaling, but in how someone moves inside it.
That point about communication trying to shape behavior rather than just transmit information fits. Information is directional, even when we think we’re “just sharing,” we’re anticipating uptake.
On a larger scale, when people are in a defensive position in communication, it's harder for them to receive information. Additionally, in a culture that's always performing, always signaling, always protecting status and appearance, more genuine meaning and substance get dropped in the exchange.
I actually only see extremely poor mind readers. Because mind reading is entirely based in empathy which essentially is projecting your own thoughts and experiences unto others. This is not the best way to understand others. And adding a layer of pseudo intellectual bullshit on top of it (psycho-analyses) only gives the superficial impression of understanding but never actually gets tested on how reliable it is. I sincerely doubt humans are good mind readers. They may be better than other animals, but good? I doubt it.
The claim that humans often bullshit about the contents of others' minds (a claim I naturally agree with) is different from the claim that humans are good at reading others' minds when they are sufficiently incentivized to read them correctly. They might occasionally get the readout wrong in the same way a cheetah will occasionally fail to catch its prey. But that doesn't mean humans are bad at mind reading, any more than cheetahs are bad at catching prey.
When you contrasted science with the everyday interesting bullshit in the essay you cited, it struck me that this overlooks the sheer volume of bullshit that exists throughout science itself. The scientific community has perfected a flawless rebuttal to accusations of bullshit: namely, that science requires mistakes in order to progress. No other field of life is given such a handicap, or at least not to this extent. Thus, no matter how many people suffer from quackery, scientists will be able to flaunt their virtue for the sake of prestige and grants.
By the way, doesn’t it worry you that if everything is bullshit, then by definition the claim that everything is bullshit is also bullshit? That your motto simplifies things just as much as all the other simplistic theories in this complex world that you condemn? Doesn’t it wear you down that by writing this blog, you’re merely signaling? Doesn’t that realization take away at least some of the desire?
To be honest, no, the idea that I'm merely signaling by writing this blog doesn't wear me down. Knowing about the nature of my motivations has not made them go away.
Signalling is most credible when signals are differentially costly. It has to be more difficult - more expensive - for low status signalers to imitate high status signalers for us to really believe the signaler.
Part of our "mind reading ability", that is our ability to recursively solve for the equilibrium of social games, is that we are pretty good at recognizing when a signal is genuine. We look for costs. Credible signalling helps us "find our people". Gossip helps. This all makes humanity wonderful!
When the signal is a lie, we tend to figure it out quickly and the signaler knows we will. Maybe there's a search-match dynamic in signal exploration, but often the lie serves as a signal in and of itself.
I think Solzhenitsyn's insights apply generally: "We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying."
Signalling is also about communication, not just status. As an autistic person, I only really care about status inasmuch as it's necessary to survive. I am, as a consequence, high on offensive signalling and comparatively low on defensive signalling.
I do both, of course. But doing what excites me matters more to me than impressing or offending other people, which translates to offensive signalling.
When I cared more what others thought, I nixed the offensive signalling and was basically silent and worked on my passions in secret. I still mostly didn't think to signal defensively aside from apologizing compulsively (I don't like hurting people).
I started offensively signalling when I realized it could help me find my people (mostly weirdos). Hence, communication. But then, I don't have any hope of doing well socially--too weird, too disinterested.
Once everyone signals to a sufficient degree and we can't discriminate based on signalling easily - does it not then signalling become a large waste? Once everyone learns to the test not for knowledge, once everyone plays the rules rather than the game. Seems like we end up all worse off for the effort, while gaining almost nothing about others fitness. Except - the person is willing to go with the herd. Like when one person on a stand stands up, then few follow, then shortly after everyone is standing? And no-one gained advantage: they can all still not/see as before, only now they are all standing rather than sitting comfortably.
Yes agreed we often get stuck in many races to the bottom, or cases where we all stand up to get a better view and no one gets a better view. But it’s hard to avoid such races to the bottom because every individual has an incentive defect at others’ expense. It falls into the category of a collective action problem, about which oceans of ink have been spilled.
Yes agreed collective action problem. I imagine there will be biological adaptations in our brains that we maybe can't see (like inner versions of peacock's tails, so we can't see them; but fair to assume they'd have been created). Given everything alive that's multi-unit made of smaller constituent units, the units face the same cooperation-competition problem of not/cheating (e.g. my cells being little animals that coordinate to make me; or at lest my body), and too have 'tragedy of the commons' - I wonder how they solve this problem. I'm being reminded now of this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua67aXBP76k I heard few weeks ago and found it interesting.
I think another aspect to consider is the extent to which signaling reflects proximate rather than ultimate causes. I suspect much of our behavior stems from ultimate causes—drivers of which we are largely unconscious—that have instilled in us a sincere motivation to act in certain ways.
Take art, for example: while its ultimate purpose may be to impress the upper class, we may nonetheless experience genuine artistic impulses and truly enjoy creating art for its own sake (an exception might be made for postmodern and contemporary art, where the primary motivation often appears to be conscious and deliberate signaling).
Likewise with much prosocial behavior: one may feel genuine concern for, and an impulse to help, one’s fellow human beings, without any keen awareness—if any at all—that signaling may be involved.
Yes, probably most signaling happens unconsciously (I write about this in the footnote). But I find it puzzling that charity or art is considered “genuine” so long as the underlying signaling motive is kept beneath conscious awareness. Why should consciousness of the motive matter? The concept of “genuineness” is very mysterious to me.
I’d argue that consciousness of the motive matters for the same reason you considered defensive signaling good news: it allows us to accept “that signaling pervades human behavior without being extremely cynical at the same time”. It seems to me there’s a substantive difference between, say, someone whose sole conscious motivation for donating to charity is improving his social standing, and someone whose sole conscious motivation is compassion and concern for those in need—that is, a genuine concern for the well-being of others. The ultimate cause of the latter may be identical to the proximate one of the former, but I for one would succumb to a more acute sense of cynicism if everyone resembled the "hypocrite" in this imagined scenario.
Yea I have that intuition about the person who helps the needy. But I have no idea why I have that intuition. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that consciousness of the motive should matter so much.
Can’t babies differentiate music from other sounds? Don’t humans have emotional responses to combinations of colours and sounds? I don’t know enough about the neuroscience behind this but I really don’t see how “all art is signalling”, otherwise why would, for example, children explore sounds on the piano by themselves?
First time reader here. It was very interesting, thanks. I guess that signalling is far less prevalent in more egalitarian cultures (let's say a tribe of hunter-gatherers), where hierarchies are presumably non existent (or that is what I've heard). If you could share your thoughts on it I'd be grateful.
The claim that hunter gatherer societies are egalitarian has actually been challenged by Chris Von Rueden, and the claim that ancestral humans were primarily small-scale and egalitarian has been challenged in a great paper by Manvir Singh and Luke Glowaki. So I don't think signaling is any less prevalent in hunter gatherer societies, though of course I would expect the content of the signals to be very different.
The offensive/defensive distinction clarifies a lot. What looks like vanity is often anxiety that ends up performing vanity to not let the seams show. But once signaling becomes common knowledge, we don’t just manage trait, we manage impressions about impressions. The recursion accelerates and rooms heat up.
The instability may not come from signaling itself, but from the absence of pause. Without some way to complete a thought before reacting to how it will be judged, even defensive signals can escalate.
I agree with David Pinsof’s arguments that a huge portion of human behavior is driven by signaling, meaning the ways we try to shape how others see us.
Status seeking is what we see indeed in a society that is mainly shaped by incentives, by reward and punishment, thus by extrinsic motivation.
Yet, there is a whole world between and inside humans that has nothing to do with extrinsic motivation. The basic psychological intrinsic needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness, as described by Self-Determination Theory are connected to intrinsic motivation and especially, to well-being.
Pinsof describes a world where most behavior is defensive signaling, people trying to avoid shame, exclusion, or low status. SDT agrees that this happens, but frames it as a symptom of need frustration, not a core human motive.
SDT sees status seeking and defensive behavior as a stress response, not as the base line of human behavior.
When humans are intrinsically motivated, they are also much less judgmental. Being relatively non-judgmental is great for mental health!
I think this type of grand claim needs to be accompanied by experimental proofs. Conjecture is interesting but not sufficiently compelling.
For instance,
The majority of the fields that have an interest in decision-making, judgment and choice would argue that behavior is mostly guided by learning, thus by rewards and punishments. There is a division between what we call primary rewards (sex, food, beverages, shelters) and secondary rewards (money, and especially reputation). Secondary rewards are useful in the sense they help indirectly reaching primary rewards. Reputation is useful to acquire food in the distant future. Hence, one could easily argue that the statement '60% or more of human condition is signaling', is illusory or incomplete. In fact, statements like '60% or more of human condition is foraging' would seem as plausible, if not more plausible.
See the works of Dreher et al., for a clean dissociation between the 2 types of rewards, including a distinct anatomofunctional relationship between the local morphology and the type of reward:
This is insightful, but does it get the causality backwards? The "read the room" gestalt almost certainly precedes the atomized recursion we use to explain our "fast think" using our "slow think." Other social primates couldn't achieve the resolution we do without language, but I would think their read of body language and other forms of social pressure would otherwise be a fully intact capability.
Interesting and I kinda wonder the same about other animals. Just as an anecdote, I don't believe I have much better mind reading skills than my dog, for example. She will know without fail my emotions and (some of) my intentions. ometimes I try to project the inverse intention I actually have, and I mostly fail (e.g. we are not going to the vet, just for a walk!). I assume evolution has made mind reading such a favorable trait that any social animal oblivious to it would have problems.
The big (but not only) difference is the ability to correct theories of mind using language. I was anxious/mad about THIS not THAT. Dogs may be able to read the room and changes in the room better than most social animals (hard to judge when we tend to just compare to ourselves), but the reasons for those changes, a dog has no strong means to disambiguate.
I think we are looking at an application of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." There was a time when status was distinctly downstream from good behaviour. We handed out prestige to the people who were doing good and being excellent for it's own sake, not for some reputational reward .... assuming we noticed at all. Getting prestige was like finding money in the street .... nice when it happened but not the reason you go on walks. These virtuous people still exist. But these days, there are rather more people in it for the reward. If this makes them become more virtuous than they would be otherwise, this is all to the good. But once they figure out how to signal virtue without going to the effort of being virtuous ... it's all over until we devise a better way of detecting those undeserving of our esteem.
I think it is a mistake to assume that just because you can signal with a behavour it is the only, or even the primary reason you did it. We can have lots of motivations, and cynical takes are as limited as naive ones.
Another masterful essay on reputation management, following on the heels of Charisma is Bullshit. By the one-item intelligence test (the degree that your views are the same as mine), David Pinsof is a genius.
Although I cannot fault him for not citing sources that he is not familiar with or influenced by (or was simply unable to cite due to lack of time or space because you cannot cite every relevant source), I wish he would acknowledge the work of Erving Goffman's ideas on impression management in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Also (for selfish reasons) writings by my graduate school mentor, Robert Hogan (who was influenced by Goffman), and myself about personality as a form of reputation management by signaling. Hogan has argued that it is all about "getting along" (having people like you) and "getting ahead" (establishing status), and that signaling is the method by which people strive to achieve these things.
Hogan and I believe that most signaling is perfectly unconscious. Which makes good sense because self-conscious self-presentation tends to be awkward and unconvincing. I was wondering what David thought about conscious versus unconscious signaling, and glad to see that he commented on that in a footnote.
Whenever we say something like "most signaling is defensive" or "most signaling is unconscious," this raises the question of meaningful, stable individual differences (that is, personality) that coexist with the general trend. I wonder if David thinks that, in contrast to the generalization that most signaling is defensive, there are people who are consistently more offensive in their signaling than the typical individual, and how we might characterize them. Narcissistic? Histrionic?
One more thought that came to mind while reading this essay concerns the unacknowledged details about the function of informational signaling. This is not a shortcoming of the present essay, which could not possibly answer that question in a single Substack post. It seems to me that there has been an unbalanced treatment of the functions of communication by scientists who study this topic. Speech communication experts have written so much about the purpose of communication being the transfer of information from one person to another, and so little about how communications are literally attempts to control the behavior of other people. We do speak to give others information, but we don't provide information for the sole purpose of providing information. Rather, there is almost always an assumption that this information will make the other person feel a certain way, which will motivate them to behave in ways that we would like them to.
The field of linguistic pragmatics does deal with this function of communication, but pragmatics has been overshadowed by research on syntax and semantics. To its credit, the current essay suggests that the general function of signaling is to achieve status (or to avoid losing status). But the unanswered question is, what specific behaviors in the other person are we trying to encourage that will help our own status? The answer to that question is surely that there are dozens of specific behaviors that we are trying to encourage, depending on context, and that documenting them all could take a team of researchers a lifetime to achieve. I'm just saying that this could be a worthwhile endeavor.
Thanks for the kind words, John. I may have to steal that joke about the one-item intelligence test. I agree there is variation in signaling behavior, and in particular the strength of offensive vs. defensive motivation. I strongly suspect that people who are more inclined toward offense would score more highly on things like narcissism, but I'm not an expert in this area. I fully agree with you that linguistics has too big of an emphasis on information transmission and not nearly as big of an emphasis on pragmatics, social signaling, emotional and epistemic vigilance, and ostensive communication. I'm a big fan of Thom Scott-Philips' work in this area, who is leading the charge in making linguistics more rigorously evolutionary. Of course, the complexity of the social signals here are dizzying and I don't pretend to know a fraction of it. I confess I haven't read Goffman, though I do hear his name a lot in reference to my work. You've convinced me to give him a proper read and citation the next time I bring up these ideas. I will also check out Hogan. Thanks for the recommendations.
Feel free to steal the joke--I stole it from Hogan. Thank you for the tip on the work of Thom Scott-Philips and on Robert Hanson. Both look very interesting.
This reads like a shift from “signaling as peacocking” to “signaling as navigation.” If most signaling is unconscious and often defensive, then it’s less about manipulation, and more about maintaining footing in a status aware environment. The system runs whether or not we narrate it, and we're all inside it.
The interesting tension you’re pointing to is between the general rule (most signaling is defensive) and individual differences: who escalates, stabilizes, or overreaches. Because there's an exchange between two humans who may both be signaling to be protective. That feels like where personality lives: not outside of signaling, but in how someone moves inside it.
That point about communication trying to shape behavior rather than just transmit information fits. Information is directional, even when we think we’re “just sharing,” we’re anticipating uptake.
On a larger scale, when people are in a defensive position in communication, it's harder for them to receive information. Additionally, in a culture that's always performing, always signaling, always protecting status and appearance, more genuine meaning and substance get dropped in the exchange.
It is Sneetches all the way down
I actually only see extremely poor mind readers. Because mind reading is entirely based in empathy which essentially is projecting your own thoughts and experiences unto others. This is not the best way to understand others. And adding a layer of pseudo intellectual bullshit on top of it (psycho-analyses) only gives the superficial impression of understanding but never actually gets tested on how reliable it is. I sincerely doubt humans are good mind readers. They may be better than other animals, but good? I doubt it.
The claim that humans often bullshit about the contents of others' minds (a claim I naturally agree with) is different from the claim that humans are good at reading others' minds when they are sufficiently incentivized to read them correctly. They might occasionally get the readout wrong in the same way a cheetah will occasionally fail to catch its prey. But that doesn't mean humans are bad at mind reading, any more than cheetahs are bad at catching prey.
That indeed is an important qualifier, when people are sufficiently incentivized.
When you contrasted science with the everyday interesting bullshit in the essay you cited, it struck me that this overlooks the sheer volume of bullshit that exists throughout science itself. The scientific community has perfected a flawless rebuttal to accusations of bullshit: namely, that science requires mistakes in order to progress. No other field of life is given such a handicap, or at least not to this extent. Thus, no matter how many people suffer from quackery, scientists will be able to flaunt their virtue for the sake of prestige and grants.
By the way, doesn’t it worry you that if everything is bullshit, then by definition the claim that everything is bullshit is also bullshit? That your motto simplifies things just as much as all the other simplistic theories in this complex world that you condemn? Doesn’t it wear you down that by writing this blog, you’re merely signaling? Doesn’t that realization take away at least some of the desire?
Yes, the claim that everything is bullshit is also bullshit--a sweeping generalization designed to capture your attention, which I talk about in this essay: https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/you-will-find-this-interesting
To be honest, no, the idea that I'm merely signaling by writing this blog doesn't wear me down. Knowing about the nature of my motivations has not made them go away.
Signalling is most credible when signals are differentially costly. It has to be more difficult - more expensive - for low status signalers to imitate high status signalers for us to really believe the signaler.
Part of our "mind reading ability", that is our ability to recursively solve for the equilibrium of social games, is that we are pretty good at recognizing when a signal is genuine. We look for costs. Credible signalling helps us "find our people". Gossip helps. This all makes humanity wonderful!
When the signal is a lie, we tend to figure it out quickly and the signaler knows we will. Maybe there's a search-match dynamic in signal exploration, but often the lie serves as a signal in and of itself.
I think Solzhenitsyn's insights apply generally: "We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying."
Signalling is also about communication, not just status. As an autistic person, I only really care about status inasmuch as it's necessary to survive. I am, as a consequence, high on offensive signalling and comparatively low on defensive signalling.
I do both, of course. But doing what excites me matters more to me than impressing or offending other people, which translates to offensive signalling.
When I cared more what others thought, I nixed the offensive signalling and was basically silent and worked on my passions in secret. I still mostly didn't think to signal defensively aside from apologizing compulsively (I don't like hurting people).
I started offensively signalling when I realized it could help me find my people (mostly weirdos). Hence, communication. But then, I don't have any hope of doing well socially--too weird, too disinterested.
Once everyone signals to a sufficient degree and we can't discriminate based on signalling easily - does it not then signalling become a large waste? Once everyone learns to the test not for knowledge, once everyone plays the rules rather than the game. Seems like we end up all worse off for the effort, while gaining almost nothing about others fitness. Except - the person is willing to go with the herd. Like when one person on a stand stands up, then few follow, then shortly after everyone is standing? And no-one gained advantage: they can all still not/see as before, only now they are all standing rather than sitting comfortably.
Yes agreed we often get stuck in many races to the bottom, or cases where we all stand up to get a better view and no one gets a better view. But it’s hard to avoid such races to the bottom because every individual has an incentive defect at others’ expense. It falls into the category of a collective action problem, about which oceans of ink have been spilled.
Yes agreed collective action problem. I imagine there will be biological adaptations in our brains that we maybe can't see (like inner versions of peacock's tails, so we can't see them; but fair to assume they'd have been created). Given everything alive that's multi-unit made of smaller constituent units, the units face the same cooperation-competition problem of not/cheating (e.g. my cells being little animals that coordinate to make me; or at lest my body), and too have 'tragedy of the commons' - I wonder how they solve this problem. I'm being reminded now of this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua67aXBP76k I heard few weeks ago and found it interesting.
I think another aspect to consider is the extent to which signaling reflects proximate rather than ultimate causes. I suspect much of our behavior stems from ultimate causes—drivers of which we are largely unconscious—that have instilled in us a sincere motivation to act in certain ways.
Take art, for example: while its ultimate purpose may be to impress the upper class, we may nonetheless experience genuine artistic impulses and truly enjoy creating art for its own sake (an exception might be made for postmodern and contemporary art, where the primary motivation often appears to be conscious and deliberate signaling).
Likewise with much prosocial behavior: one may feel genuine concern for, and an impulse to help, one’s fellow human beings, without any keen awareness—if any at all—that signaling may be involved.
Yes, probably most signaling happens unconsciously (I write about this in the footnote). But I find it puzzling that charity or art is considered “genuine” so long as the underlying signaling motive is kept beneath conscious awareness. Why should consciousness of the motive matter? The concept of “genuineness” is very mysterious to me.
Thanks. I shouldn’t have skipped the footnote.
I’d argue that consciousness of the motive matters for the same reason you considered defensive signaling good news: it allows us to accept “that signaling pervades human behavior without being extremely cynical at the same time”. It seems to me there’s a substantive difference between, say, someone whose sole conscious motivation for donating to charity is improving his social standing, and someone whose sole conscious motivation is compassion and concern for those in need—that is, a genuine concern for the well-being of others. The ultimate cause of the latter may be identical to the proximate one of the former, but I for one would succumb to a more acute sense of cynicism if everyone resembled the "hypocrite" in this imagined scenario.
Yea I have that intuition about the person who helps the needy. But I have no idea why I have that intuition. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that consciousness of the motive should matter so much.
Can’t babies differentiate music from other sounds? Don’t humans have emotional responses to combinations of colours and sounds? I don’t know enough about the neuroscience behind this but I really don’t see how “all art is signalling”, otherwise why would, for example, children explore sounds on the piano by themselves?
First time reader here. It was very interesting, thanks. I guess that signalling is far less prevalent in more egalitarian cultures (let's say a tribe of hunter-gatherers), where hierarchies are presumably non existent (or that is what I've heard). If you could share your thoughts on it I'd be grateful.
The claim that hunter gatherer societies are egalitarian has actually been challenged by Chris Von Rueden, and the claim that ancestral humans were primarily small-scale and egalitarian has been challenged in a great paper by Manvir Singh and Luke Glowaki. So I don't think signaling is any less prevalent in hunter gatherer societies, though of course I would expect the content of the signals to be very different.
Great.
I started reading your posts in the past couple months. It is a wonderful, humanizing perspective.
Give me the HAMMER 🔨
The offensive/defensive distinction clarifies a lot. What looks like vanity is often anxiety that ends up performing vanity to not let the seams show. But once signaling becomes common knowledge, we don’t just manage trait, we manage impressions about impressions. The recursion accelerates and rooms heat up.
The instability may not come from signaling itself, but from the absence of pause. Without some way to complete a thought before reacting to how it will be judged, even defensive signals can escalate.
I agree with David Pinsof’s arguments that a huge portion of human behavior is driven by signaling, meaning the ways we try to shape how others see us.
Status seeking is what we see indeed in a society that is mainly shaped by incentives, by reward and punishment, thus by extrinsic motivation.
Yet, there is a whole world between and inside humans that has nothing to do with extrinsic motivation. The basic psychological intrinsic needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness, as described by Self-Determination Theory are connected to intrinsic motivation and especially, to well-being.
Pinsof describes a world where most behavior is defensive signaling, people trying to avoid shame, exclusion, or low status. SDT agrees that this happens, but frames it as a symptom of need frustration, not a core human motive.
SDT sees status seeking and defensive behavior as a stress response, not as the base line of human behavior.
When humans are intrinsically motivated, they are also much less judgmental. Being relatively non-judgmental is great for mental health!
I think this type of grand claim needs to be accompanied by experimental proofs. Conjecture is interesting but not sufficiently compelling.
For instance,
The majority of the fields that have an interest in decision-making, judgment and choice would argue that behavior is mostly guided by learning, thus by rewards and punishments. There is a division between what we call primary rewards (sex, food, beverages, shelters) and secondary rewards (money, and especially reputation). Secondary rewards are useful in the sense they help indirectly reaching primary rewards. Reputation is useful to acquire food in the distant future. Hence, one could easily argue that the statement '60% or more of human condition is signaling', is illusory or incomplete. In fact, statements like '60% or more of human condition is foraging' would seem as plausible, if not more plausible.
See the works of Dreher et al., for a clean dissociation between the 2 types of rewards, including a distinct anatomofunctional relationship between the local morphology and the type of reward:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.02.002
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/35/4/1648.full.pdf
This is insightful, but does it get the causality backwards? The "read the room" gestalt almost certainly precedes the atomized recursion we use to explain our "fast think" using our "slow think." Other social primates couldn't achieve the resolution we do without language, but I would think their read of body language and other forms of social pressure would otherwise be a fully intact capability.
Interesting and I kinda wonder the same about other animals. Just as an anecdote, I don't believe I have much better mind reading skills than my dog, for example. She will know without fail my emotions and (some of) my intentions. ometimes I try to project the inverse intention I actually have, and I mostly fail (e.g. we are not going to the vet, just for a walk!). I assume evolution has made mind reading such a favorable trait that any social animal oblivious to it would have problems.
The big (but not only) difference is the ability to correct theories of mind using language. I was anxious/mad about THIS not THAT. Dogs may be able to read the room and changes in the room better than most social animals (hard to judge when we tend to just compare to ourselves), but the reasons for those changes, a dog has no strong means to disambiguate.
I think we are looking at an application of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." There was a time when status was distinctly downstream from good behaviour. We handed out prestige to the people who were doing good and being excellent for it's own sake, not for some reputational reward .... assuming we noticed at all. Getting prestige was like finding money in the street .... nice when it happened but not the reason you go on walks. These virtuous people still exist. But these days, there are rather more people in it for the reward. If this makes them become more virtuous than they would be otherwise, this is all to the good. But once they figure out how to signal virtue without going to the effort of being virtuous ... it's all over until we devise a better way of detecting those undeserving of our esteem.
I think it is a mistake to assume that just because you can signal with a behavour it is the only, or even the primary reason you did it. We can have lots of motivations, and cynical takes are as limited as naive ones.